Chapter 12. Manageability


In This Chapter

  • Administration Facilities

  • Adding Administration Facilities

In their book Understanding SOA with Web Services, Eric Newcomer and Greg Lomow present a vision of "the service-oriented enterprise": "Driven by the convergence of key technologies and the universal adoption of Web services, the service-oriented enterprise promises to significantly improve corporate agility, speed time-to-market for new products and services, reduce IT costs, and improve operational efficiency" (Newcomer and Lomow 2005, 2).

This is precisely the vision being used to sell business decision-makers on the idea of adopting service orientation. Yet service orientation is merely a way of making software, developing it in the form of classes that implement WSDL interfaces. So what is the magic by which a particular approach to developing software yields significant improvements in corporate agility and time-to-market, reduced information technology costs, and operational efficiency? Well, service-oriented software is assumed to be readily composable units of which not only the functionality but also the costs and other operational characteristics are well-known. Thus, a business equipped with service-oriented software is presumed to be able to adjust to its market by quickly reassembling its information systems appropriately from various service-oriented components, "deriving the information system design from the business design [to] more easily drive changes into the information system at the rate and pace of change in the business design" (High, Kinder and Graham 2005, 7). For that to be possible, it is not sufficient only to know what a software service can do and how it communicates, which is all that WSDL can say. It is also necessary for its cost of ownership to be measurable and monitored so that the financial feasibility of a given assembly of services can be readily and continually assessed, and it must be easy to deploy and administer. Only then can one hope to be able to "tun[e] the operational environment to meet the business objectives…and measur[e] success or failure to meet those objectives" (High, Kinder and Graham 2005, 23). Software services, then, are supposed to be manageable, both as software entities by systems administrators and as components of a business enterprise, as budget line items.

Yet, although an important impetus for the adoption of service orientation is the prospect of an information services infrastructure composed of readily manageable units, the manageability of services has been quite neglected in the various facilities for developing software services that have been available up to this point. Microsoft .NET Web Services and the Web Services Enhancements for Microsoft .NET provide no management features specifically for software services, although AmberPoint Express, which provides for monitoring the performance of services and diagnosing errors in them, is freely available for use with certain versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. IBM's Emerging Technologies Toolkit for Web Services and Autonomic Computing only provides classes for developing implementations of the WS-Resource Framework specification. That specification defines a language by which a service can identify properties it can monitor and manipulate, and by which clients can retrieve and modify property values. IBM also offers for sale the Tivoli Application Manager for SOA, which, similar to AmberPoint's free Express product, allows one to monitor and remedy the performance of software services.

In stark contrast to its predecessors, the Windows Communication Foundation is deliberately designed to meet the requirement for manageable software services. It does so in two ways. First, it provides a rich variety of tools for systems administrators to use to manage Windows Communication Foundation solutions. Second, it allows software developers to easily augment those tools for systems administrators, and also to add facilities that will be unique to each business enterprise, by which business administrators can monitor costs, risks, and returns.

In preparation for exploring these tools, follow these steps:

1.

Copy the code associated with this chapter that you downloaded from www.samspublishing.com to the folder C:\WCFHandsOn. The code is all in a folder called Management. After the code has been unzipped, there should be a folder that looks like the one shown in Figure 12.1.

Figure 12.1. The Management folder.


2.

Open the solution C:\WCFHandsOn\Management\TradingService.sln.

3.

Install Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), if it is not already installed.

Also complete these next few steps if support for the WS-AtomicTransactions protocol in the Microsoft Distributed Transactions Coordinator has not already been enabled:

1.

Open the Microsoft Windows Vista DEBUG Build Environment prompt, which, assuming a complete and normal installation of the Microsoft Windows SDK for the December 2005 WinFX CTP, should be accessible from the Windows Start menu by choosing All Programs, Microsoft Windows SDK, CMD Shell.

2.

Enter this command:

xws_reg wsat+


3.

Then enter this one:

exit

The solution is for building a derivatives trading system. Derivatives were introduced in Chapter 2, "The Fundamentals," and the derivatives trading system manages the risk in buying them. The TradingService project in the solution builds a trading service for pricing and purchasing derivatives, and the TradingServiceHost project constructs the host for that service. The TradeRecordingService project builds a trade recording service that the trading service uses to execute the purchase of derivatives, and the TradeRecordingServiceHost project constructs the host of the recording service. The client project in the solution is for building a risk management system. That risk management system uses the trading service to price and execute two derivatives purchases at a time: a primary purchase, and another one that is intended as a hedge against the possibility of losses on the first purchase. Depending on the difference in the prices of the primary and hedge purchases, the risk management system will commit either to both purchases together or to neither. If the risk management system chooses not to commit to the purchases, the records of those purchases in the recording service are erased; otherwise, those records are kept.




Presenting Microsoft Communication Foundation. Hands-on.
Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation: Hands-on
ISBN: 0672328771
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 132

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